What Is an E-commerce Hosting and Can It Help Your Business?

E-commerce hosting is a web hosting service that offers businesses what is essential to be able to sell their services or products on the internet. E-commerce hosting is used by businesses of all sizes.

A business has an agreement with an e-commerce hosting provider to lease space on its computer server to form an online shop. This website space normally is billed monthly, along with any leasing of software for handling online orders. The computer server may be communal being shared with other businesses, or in cases of companies expecting a considerable amount of traffic, may be dedicated completely to one client.

What Does E-commerce Hosting Provide

Companies that do e-commerce website hosting provide several things for the website owner. These are:

Space on a server to host the company’s website

Probably the web site design or help with catalog pages

Shopping carts – capacity to accept, process and confirm sales orders

Templates for virtual storefronts as well as online catalogs

Secure credit-card purchasing

Tools for tracking and managing inventory

Assist with setting up merchant accounts for processing Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover

Basically they provide everything e-merchants need to run a business on the internet and e-commerce hosting has developed to specialize into providing the services for selling products.

Additional Tools for Ecommerce Hosting

There are other tools that e-commerce hosting offers and they include:

Tools for Selling – such as SSL certificates for transactions that are secure

Tools for Managing the Business – MS SharePoint software and electronic billing and invoicing software

These are all the tools to help make a business able to activate their business plans.

Benefits Of E-commerce Hosting

Most individuals know about the basic benefits that e-commerce offers and might help them sell more, but beyond that they are not too clear.

Geographical Market Expands – Obtain customers from across the country and around the world

Customer Base Expands – Attract as well as retain customers that might never purchase from you

Visibility is increased – tools to make business available to them as well as display products in the online store

Easy for customer to find information – this adds to the creation of a positive experience for customers

Always opened for business – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – your store is open

Decrease of cost for marketing and advertising – internet marketing can be highly aim at a specific customer base

These are all additional features that businesses get with e- commerce which are valuable tools when developing an online marketplace for your products.

Whether you are a small business or a large business you are probably missing sales in the online marketplace as it is today. If you don’t have an e-commerce presence research shows that you are missing out on potential customers around the world as well as those who shop online only. All businesses need to have some type of online presence. If you own a small jewelry business locally you still need to at least have some small page giving the details about your business as well as showing what you are selling because there are those individuals who before they go shopping will do an internet search for businesses in their town or area.

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